How Information Technology (IT) systems are managed can affect IT costs, reliability, and performance. Participants in the field of IT service management aim to produce technology and processes that enable IT systems to be managed in a formal, predictable, and efficient manner.
A common basis for many IT management tools and processes is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which is a set of guidelines, best practices, and industry standards for managing IT systems. ITIL is roughly analogous to the IBM Redbooks and is independent of any particular technologies.
Some vendors and consulting companies have produced detailed documents and software for realizing and extending ITIL's generic dictates. For example, Microsoft Corporation provides documentation explaining how to implement formal change management for Exchange servers, how to distribute software using System Management Server (SMS), how to monitor a SQL server using Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and so on. However, the roles and processes specified by ITIL for IT management are platform and vendor agnostic.
IT systems can be sensitive to change. ITIL provides guidelines for managing change in IT systems. For example, ITIL might proscribe a best practice that if a minor IT change is to be made, it should be managed in one way, but if a major change is to be made (e.g., a network modification) then the change should be managed differently. There might be an advisory change rule that representatives from key departments should be involved in making decisions about a major IT change, whereas a minor change might have an advisory rule that only limited roles should be involved.
ITIL also suggests automation for managing change. In particular, ITIL suggests the use of systems to automate the management of IT changes, for example, to track and deploy changes, to predict the affects of a change, and so on. To this end, ITIL also suggests the use of a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to centralize much of the information used in managing changes to the configuration of IT systems.
Many IT systems may have a de facto or informal CMDB, in the form of spreadsheets, local databases, paper records, etc. However, complex IT environments call for a formal CMDB to facilitate change and configuration management tools, incident handling tools, and others to allow such tools to operate on a common understanding of the configuration state of an IT system. Details of a CMDB will be discussed below in the Detailed Description.
To date, CMDBs have been designed only to track the current state of the configuration of an IT system. There has been no appreciation of the benefits that might flow from incorporating states and temporal features into a CMDB. Nor have any techniques been developed for including such features in a CMDB.